You will see many articles on back pain relief, but few on muscle pain relief. This I cannot understand as the majority of pain is created by your muscles. If you aim to correct your muscles then the majority of back pain will settle and ease. Why?

The small muscles that surround your joints cause a lot of back pain. The larger muscles such as your hamstrings, Gluteals etc will become painful as they compensate for the poor joint movement.

This poor joint movement is due mainly to the small muscles around the joint restricting the motion. If the muscle tightens then, because it is attached to the joint, it stops it from moving freely.

Get the small muscles to relax and your back pain issues are halved almost immediately. Sure you still need to make sure your pelvis and joints are balanced, but most of your back pain will ease.

Muscle pain relief is therefore an essential element in solving back pain. So how do you ease muscle tension?

Muscles tighten for two reasons. They tighten as the muscle tires and secondly they tighten as an opposite muscle is weak. Confused??

The strange thing with muscles is that as they tire out, they go into spasm. Remember how you get cramp if you exercise too much. The muscles tire as the sport or leisure activity progresses and then suddenly you get cramp. The same applies to the small muscles around your joints, if they tire they will cramp up and cause back pain. They also stop the joint moving freely.

The same with weak muscles. Think of these as you would a see-saw. One side goes up and the other down. With muscles you can have one muscle tight because an opposite muscle is weak. The problem is most people only ever deal with tight muscles, because that is where they feel pain.

To have complete and permanently muscle pain relief, you must address all types of issues. You need to stretch muscles that are tight, you need to strengthen muscles that are weak and energize those muscles that are tired.

What can you do now?

Simple, don’t stretch! Why? The first step in muscle pain relief is not stretching. It is  also not strengthening either. The first step is finding out which muscles are out of balance. How?

You do this by testing each muscle. See how far you can stretch with each and notice changes from one side compared to the other. Once you know which muscles are tighter, from there you can see which muscles you need to look at to assess if they are weak.

This may sound hard, laborious or even difficult. It isn’t, in fact it only takes a few minutes and a checklist. Then you have the perfect muscle pain relief plan, as you now know what to target. Back pain relief then becomes simple and straight forward.